Watch and Be Still
by Oreramar
Summary: One-Shot. Will Stanton was there when Harry died. He watched...yet he never interfered. "For in this world of men..." SotT.


**AN: **Just a quick thing between working on other stories and artwork. Prompted in large measure by my final British Novels essay, in which I discussed a great deal concerning the Dark and Light (and especially Grey) qualities of LotR, TDIR, and HP. And there's just not enough in this particular crossover archive...so I thought I'd contribute a bit.

Character exploration combined with outsider POV combined with a wee bit of philosophical musing. Nothing terribly epic here, but hopefully interesting all the same.

Enjoy!

* * *

The forest did not merely contain Wild Magic – it _was_ Wild Magic, far and beyond any but the most ancient of woods. Will Stanton paused, wondering, on a mountain slope just beyond the reach of the tall, dark trees, staring down at the solid shadow formed by the pre-dawn light. For an instant he doubted the wisdom of this venture, doubted that even he, the Watchman, the last of the Old Ones, could enter with impunity.

But that was it, wasn't it. He was the Watchman. And he had cause to Watch, and need to enter this stronghold of the Wild Magic, and that would simply have to be enough.

Will tugged the dark collar of his coat up around his ears, murmured spells of awareness and silence and protection to the air, and parted the fringe of trees at last.

The very air inside trembled under an iron silence. The Old One knew that life existed here, but it had hidden itself from all ordinary senses, and not a sound stirred even as he himself glided between the tall, misted trunks. The canopy and the floor were black as pitch in the night, as was bark and bough, but the pervading mist shone lightly silver-blue, as though illuminated by the same mysterious source of power which filled Will's senses, and between this sparse light and his own spells he found the forest easy enough to navigate. He followed no trails and consulted no map; he knew his destination as a man knows the direction from which a brisk breeze flows.

To an Old One of the Light, to the Watchman, even the slightest Darkness could be made as apparent as soot on snow, if he bent his attention and will upon it, rooted it out and laid it bare to his mind. This was more than a slight Darkness, for it carried with it a strange, forceful mixture of High and Wild Magics, and the depth of it compared to that of any normal man was like a storm-clouded night sky against clear heavens and a full moon.

So he followed its call until he came upon a glade, and halted at its edge, wrapped in shadow, and watched.

The spider-webbed glade was full, populated with the first living beings Will had seen yet in the still forest, nearly all of them humans. The mist illuminated their black-cloaked forms, aided by a strange, glowing blue sphere which floated in the center of the clearing. Within the sphere writhed an immense snake – a snake which, oddly enough, had its own small, magnetic pull of Darkness, a pull which matched that of the man which stood before it, just out of Will's line of sight, for he stood behind the group as they all faced the opposite edge of the clearing...watching, as he watched them. They spoke not, and if they moved, it was with a supremely careful slowness, as though they feared upsetting an unseen quarry.

The Old One, hidden by powerful spells, had no such qualms. Will moved smoothly around the edge of the clearing, seeking out a better visual of the man in the center even as his mind searched for any warning twinge, any familiar echo of the long-exiled Dark.

By the time he could see the man's face, bowed as it was over his clasped hands in a twisted semblance of prayer, Will had satisfied himself to at least some degree.

He was not truly of the Dark...not as it had been, at least, but as close to it as a living human could become. The man was warped in body, mind, and soul, cruelly bent and torn until he little resembled a man any longer, yet to an Old One, he was indeed a man still, and none of the bending had been done by that terrible power.

Will thought to leave then – men, however dark, were for men to deal with, and he had no part in their conflicts – but the sudden appearance of two more cloaked figures before the dark one, and their words, roused his idle curiosity enough to stay. He felt their steady fear, heard quiet disappointment in that snake-like man's voice ("I thought he would come"), and then, most intriguingly, sensed a brief, bright flash of power beyond them – High Magic, as that of the golden harp or the crystal sword, yet lessened somewhat, slightly different in tone and texture, and he wondered...

A boy stepped into the clearing – a boy, or perhaps yet a young man, with eyes nearly as old as Will's when his true heritage rose in him, and with a peculiar sense about him which reminded Will oddly of Bran – and stood fixedly still in the snake-man's view. A great shout rose from the humans in the clearing and the giants behind them, and a massive man bound to a tree began roaring the name "Harry" until, with a flare of the strange High and Wild yet neither magic, his voice gave out to silence.

And then everyone within and without the clearing stilled, waiting tensely to see what would happen next. For the briefest moment Will Stanton – the fellow human being, the Oxford professor who was a friend, a son, a brother, an uncle to too many nieces and nephews to count – considered stepping into the clearing at last, catching everyone out of time for a moment, just long enough to blast the red-eyed man out of it for good (he was too Dark to leave be, but still human enough that it would work), and then transporting the boy away, leaving none the wiser. Even as the thought flitted through his mind, driven by compassion and empathetic fear for the boy's life, a voice rose from the past, as though to remind him: "_For in this world of men it is the fate of men which is at stake...and no one but a man should have the judging of it."_

The dark one raised the stick of wood – a crude wand – in his pale hand, slowly, cautiously, as though testing the benefits of his every action in his mind before executing them. The boy stood stock-still, pulse hammering in his throat and his expression forcibly calm, blank, accepting. Will watched as the first suddenly screeched foreign words – words of some power, yet not of the Old Speech, and unmarked by the Dark's strange accent – and threw his wand arm forward. He clenched his hands as the green light flew across the clearing, cutting through the mist and throwing all into stark, sickly relief before striking the boy...

And both fell.

The dark-robed figures milled anxiously forward, and back, and about, the majority apparently debating the wisdom of approaching their leader, the darkest of them all. Only one woman knelt desperately at his side, calling him: "My lord..._my lord..._"

None of them had felt what Will had in the instant that green spell connected. Pure High magic, untainted and untransformed as most of their power was by Wild and Human energies, had welled up, filling the clearing so quickly and completely that it had stripped even him of every protective enchantment, whirling around Harry Potter and the unnamed lordling in twin tornadoes of invisible, insubstantial power before dissipating into nothingness as suddenly as it had come.

Hurriedly, Will wrapped himself once more in the shadows. None had seen him; all attention had been bent upon the dark man, who was now stirring, sitting up, brushing his sycophants away, ordering one to see if the boy was dead.

Turning away, Will walked further around the edge of the clearing, ignoring all the sounds and activities coming from within, and found the place where he had felt that first sharp little burst of power. He crouched, scanned the ground, and then found it: a cracked black stone, cut like a gem yet of no material Will, the jeweler's son, had ever seen before, bearing an etched geometric pattern and laying, forsaken, atop the forest loam. Without even touching it, Will knew that it was too powerful for human hands, and yet its power could be accessed by any with even a trace of High or Wild magic within their soul. He knew also that it was a melancholic power, a maddening one, and so it was with no qualms that he placed a cupped palm over it, whispered a few phrases in the Old Speech, and so hid it away so that none but he could ever find it again.

Loud sobs caught his attention. He looked up and saw the giant man, tears spilling freely into his abundant beard, walking unsteadily toward Will and the path he stood beside, cradling the boy's limp body in his arms. Will smoothly rose and slid back between the trees, watching what almost might have been a strange funerary procession pass him by. Half of them had trickled from the clearing when Will was joined by a stranger, one more sharply and extremely High and Wild and magical than any of the black-cloaked humans, yet again still less than the Greenwitch or the place where the Harp was hidden. They moved back together to avoid the wide, destructive path of the two giants at the back of the parade, and only when those had passed from vision and nearly from earshot did Will's new companion speak.

"You are not human."

"Normally, I would say that few notice...but I have never met a centaur before. Perhaps such perception is common."

Will dropped his spells of disguise and turned to see the pale, palomino-bodied centaur shake his head.

"Some could tell, as I have. But many of the herd have no liking for humans, and so would not pause long enough to notice your nature before expelling you from our territory."

"In that case, I'm glad you were the one to find me. I've no desire to dodge arrows today," Will remarked wryly, eyeing the full quiver strapped to the centaur's human back and the tautly strung short bow in his hand.

"I do not think they could harm you regardless."

"I may be wounded," Will corrected him, "and I can still feel pain."

The centaur nodded sagely, understanding more than Will's plain words said.

"I have wondered something for a while, Immortal, and I must now ask...why did you not act?"

"You saw me?"

"Only for the moment your spells were undone."

"Ah. So you were watching also...yet you, too, did nothing."

The centaur tipped his head back, gazing up through a gap in the canopy torn open by the giants' passage. Stars glimmered down faintly; the horizon was grey with the approaching sunrise.

"Regulus remains bright," the centaur remarked calmly, "and though Mars reigned for a long while this night, already it fades with the dawn, and Draco dies with it."

"Would I be wrong to guess that the boy may be symbolized by a lion, and the dark lord a serpent?"

"These are the sigils of their respective Houses," the centaur agreed blithely. Will almost smiled; it had been many years since he had enjoyed the dancing, veiled truths of such a conversation. Riddle-speech was uncommon in most modern circles; one needed an Old One for that...or, it seemed, a centaur.

"So the boy survived, and centaurs are gifted by Time to read the path of the near future, at the very least." Will also tipped his head back and regarded the stars, naming them fondly, like old friends, within his mind. "...yes, that would do."

"Are you capable of the same?"

"Not quite. The future may touch the past, yet the past is what carries us to the future," Will replied, remembering similar words spoken to him long, long ago.

The centaur was silent for a moment. Then, without an upwards glance, he said softly, "Sagittarius wakes. Will you walk with me a while?"

"Only for a while," Will agreed, and they set off together, following the trail of destruction through the lightening mists.

"I do not understand," the centaur admitted at last.

"You glimpse things through Time. I walk between its paths, but only as far as I may."

"Not into the future?"

"Not into the future."

"Then why?"

"Because it was not my part to take, nor a battle I could fight. I am a Watchman against the Dark...not a vigilante against men."

"The Serpent's soul is shattered and his star cast into deepest shadow. He would know your longevity, Immortal, by any means, and he would kill even the innocent to ensure it. And he is not Dark?"

"Dark enough that I felt concern when his power made itself known in the world two years ago," Will replied softly, "yet still too human for me to willingly destroy. His darkness is his own; the Dark itself had no hand in him, or at least not enough for the Hunt to take any account of him in the final drive."

"You would do well with the other centaurs," the palomino remarked drily. "They, too, have always placed greater stock in the higher paths of fate than in setting themselves against the immediate."

"The boy – Harry Potter," Will said suddenly, with an air almost of realization, though he also felt that he had known this for some time already. "There was a sense about him, one which tells me that his and this serpent's paths were bound. It was – and is – for him alone to live or die, and the serpent is the same. But for myself...my battle with the Dark ended long ago. This world belongs now to the High magic, and the Wild magic, and men foremost, and the Old Ones chose never to intervene."

"Their fates are bound indeed, but they are not alone in the battle. Sagittarius has awoken at last. I expect you will not join us, Immortal, Old One?"

Will shook his head.

"I have seen what I had to, and done what I must, already, and while the Wild Magic is free to do as it will now that the Light and the Dark do not exist to gain advantage by its actions, the High Magic still will not tolerate my direct interference in what is purely the matter of men, however powerful they may be."

"Very well. I found interest in our conversation, Watchman; I hope we may have another someday?"

"I do not intend to return to this forest," Will said apologetically, thinking of the stone hidden and buried in its depths.

"In that case, it is farewell," the centaur replied solemnly. "May the stars favor you."

"The same to you."

The centaur nodded, wheeled about on two legs, and galloped the rest of the way out of the forest. Will heard a faint roar rise beyond the trees, and the thunder of many hooves, and felt the flashing sparks of the strange human magic burst beyond his ordinary sight. And despite his vow not to interfere and his refusal to enter the battle himself, he spoke a spell and sent his mind winging across the grassy field, toward a battered castle and the milling confusion there, spinning around spells like a swirl of air and darting between combatants less substantial than a ghost. His sight entered a great stone room, roofed with solid sky, all fading stars and pink horizons, and human forms dancing across the floor as they threw jets of light at one another...

And there was the boy, whom the centaur called Regulus, the Lion's Heart, Harry Potter, emerging from a fold in the air as he shed a marvelous silver cloak – another powerful thing, the Old One noticed – and he paced around the Serpent, speaking of love and sacrifice, and Will understood the High Magic in the clearing better now...

Magic clashed. The Serpent fell. The Lion stood upright, unmoving, and the Sun crested the horizon at last, filling the world with light.

Will smiled and withdrew, flying back to the forest in which he still stood. There he paused a moment, regarding the fiery orange light beyond the trees, before drawing his overcoat more tightly around his body, turning around, and striding confidently off through the misty shadows beneath the trees.

Within the hour, no trace of the Old One remained save, perhaps, the spell which would conceal the Resurrection Stone for untold centuries...and the memory in one centaur's mind of a conversation with a true Immortal.


End file.
